6 Sep 2017 - 8 Sep 2017 All day Babbage Lecture Theatre (New Museum Site)

Description

Please note that this event is primarily a closed workshop. There will, however, be two public events which will be open to all free of charge. 

 

Convenors

Clément Feger (University of Cambridge)

Bhaskar Vira (University of Cambridge)

Laurent Mermet (AgroParisTech)

 

Summary

After the recent development of accounting for biodiversity and ecosystems at the business level and at the national level, a third construction site in accounting research is necessary at the scale of inter-organizational ecosystem management.

This calls for a constructive dialogue between conservationists who design and use new information systems on ecosystems in multiple contexts but face challenges in obtaining the political and social changes they expect, and critical accounting researchers who can provide deep knowledge on the connections between information, accounts exchange, accountabilities, values and all forms of collective organized action.

The workshop will build on the presence of a strong community of conservation research and practice in Cambridge (notably based at the University of Cambridge's Conservation Research Institute and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative), and will provide them for the first time with a space to engage with critical and social and environmental accounting researchers.

We hope that this new interdisciplinary bridge will set off theoretical elaborations, as well as concrete working relationships and future experimentations of accounting for the management of ecosystems innovations that can ultimately lead to better achievement of ecological and social results. The new path of research that this workshop will discuss will provide a critical, theoretical and practical alternative to the already well-established collaborations of conservation research with the field of economics.

The conference will combine intensive closed workshop sessions with two public events on the topic.

 

Public Events – open to all

Both events will take place in the Babbage Lecture Theatre.

 

Wednesday 6 September, 5pm to 7pm

Public welcome and short presentation of the general background and perspective of the event: ‘Accounting and conservation: opening a new dialogue’ (by the convenors)

 

Keynote lecture by Professor Paolo Quattrone (University of Edinburgh)

'Who said accounting was boring? Rhetoric and the making of socie-ties’

 

Friday 8 September, 2pm to 3.30pm

Panel discussion: 'Perspectives on the development of accounting for the management of ecosystems'

After progress in corporate biodiversity accounting and ecosystem accounting at the national scale, members of the panel will draw on their own research to reflect on the need, the challenges and the opportunities to develop a new front of accounting innovations at the ecosystem management scale.

Beyond the panelists, all participants to the workshop will be encouraged to react and share their views. The outcomes of the two-days workshop’s discussions will also be presented to the public. 

 

Sponsors

              

Supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), the University of Cambridge's Conservation Research Institute, and the Luc Hoffmann Institute. 

 

 

Administrative assistance: events@crassh.cam.ac.uk

 

 

Image Credits

The original painting is attributed to the Italian Renaissance artist Jacopo de' Barbari. Some facetious contemporary ecosystem accounting researchers have replaced the rhombicuboctahedron suspended from the ceiling in the original painting by the GLOBIO Model that accounts for human impacts on biodiversity, and the geometric figure he is working on by a representation of the planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009 and Steffen et al, 2015). The GLOBIO model is a snapshot from convenor Clément Feger's own use.

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